Bless My Heart I Married A Yankee

Egg Bites This is my take on a very popular item on the breakfast menu at Starbucks.  Seems everyone just loves them. Let's be honest, Starbucks is expensive and these little babies go for a nice price there.   A lot of people are making them now in their Instant Pot.  I truly adore Starbucks but honestly, they get expensive and I am just way to frugal to waste that kind of money on a daily basis. Incredibly easy to make?  Heck yeah!!! All you really need is a few ingredients and you are set.   Egss, egg whites, cottage cheese, heavy cream or half and half, cheese and from there you can add about anything else.   I prefer to make mine with egg whites and no whole eggs.   You can really use just about any cheese you want but I feel that cottage cheese is a must.   I have used gruyere, smoked gouda, feta, goat milk cheddar and monterey so far. They are fun, easy and quick to...

Every once in a while I like to have a fancy girlie drink.   My drink of choice is normally vodka so why not make a Cosmopolitan tonight? They really are easy to make.  All you need is vodka, triple sec, limes and cranberry juice.  Oh and ice and a shaker. You guys know me, I love homemade stuff so of course, I have homemade cranberry juice. Which is so easy to make but you must have a bit of patience because my recipe takes 6 weeks.   Which is a whole different story. I use 3 ounces vodka 1-1 /2 oz triple sec 1 oz cranberry juice Squeeze a slice of lime Add all the ingredients to an ice-filled shaker and shake. You really need to shake for a while.   A bartender once told me to shake and shake and shake some more. He told me the trick to a good martini is to shake till your hand is nice and cold from the ice in your shaker. Pour into a martini glass and garnish with a slice of lime.   Y...

Broccoli is so very easy in the Pressure Cooker.   All you have to do is cut your broccoli up to whatever size you like to eat.  My favorite part of broccoli is the stems.   So I make sure I cut some of the stems up.   Put a cup of water in the inner pot and place it into the base. Put your broccoli in a steamer. Here I used a fold out steamer. There are all kinds of steamers out that you can purchase.  Once you have your broccoli in the pot, place the lids on and close it. Make sure you have your steam valve on close.  If you forget to do this, you will waste a bit of time because the pot cannot come to pressure if the steam is coming out of the valve. Yes, I have made this mistake more than once. Set your pressure cooker on 0 minutes.   Yes, I said 0 minutes. Remember the pot has to come to pressure, which cooks the broccoli. Of course, if you like yours more done j...

Oh me Oh my look how big my girl is getting!   Last Thursday Charley was 12 weeks old.  Thank goodness she is better and growing well. I just love this puppy.  She is awesome.  Yeah she is a lot of work  but she is well worth the time. Can you see she is asleep standing up?  The poor pup was exhausted.  This picture is of Charley on her first major trip.   Well major for her and me,  It was a trip an hour long.  Then, of course, another hour home.  Overall she did well.  I only almost wrecked twice.  Let's just say I need to take her on more short trips to get her used to riding in her new basket. Enjoy!! Here is a new picture of my precious girl.  4/21/2018 Oh she holds my heart!

Guacamole is wonderful.  Well like most things, either you love it or hate it.  No real in between when it comes to this green goddess of goodness.  My daughter does NOT care for it at all.  Anytime we have Mexican she makes sure she orders her dish without guac.  While I, on the other hand, want lots of it.  I actually order whatever I am having around not paying extra for it.   One spring in the Outer Banks a friend of mine made it fresh.  I have been hooked ever since then.  If you have never made Guacamole you should try it even if you really do not care for the stuff.  Who knows it might just change your mind or should I say taste buds.  Plus it really is super easy to make.  Should I go into the health benefits of this little fruit called an Avacado?  Yes, it is a fruit, not a vegetable.   All you really need is a ripe avocado, a lime, onion, garlic, and a Roma tomato.   Juice yo...

What a can of crescent rolls can do is amazing.  You can fill the individual rolls with about anything.  Or you can roll them out and make a bread braid or a ring.  My daughter, MacKenzie use to take some of my homemade jelly and make a breakfast or dessert with them.   Honestly, you can do just about anything you want with a roll or two of crescent dough.  Since it is normally just Scott and me eating I do not do a huge ring/circle which uses 2 rolls.  I use one roll and unwind them.  They come out in a pair of 2 like a rectangle.  You will have 4 rectangles and I just put them down on a cookie sheet and press the edges together to make them hold to each other.  At this point, you can fill it however you would like.   So far I have made a buffalo chicken crescent braid and a spicy Italian one.   Buffalo Chicken Crescent Braid 4 oz softened cream cheese 1/4 C Texas Pete 2 C chopped cooked chicken...

A few years ago our garden was producing so many hot peppers I did not know what to do with all of them.  You know me, what do I do when I have no clue what to do with something?  I research research research.  Google and I are like best friends.  Off I go to the internet doing my searches on what do with an overabundance of hot peppers.  Low and behold, I found a  sriracha recipe.  Honestly, I had never even heard of sriracha.  Had no clue what it was or how it was used.  I found it funny when I was told that is what you get as a hot sauce in a Japanese restaurant because I love that stuff.  With all that said, of course, I made sriracha and canned the crap out of it.  I have so much sriracha even my sriracha told me not to make any last summer.  OK, well maybe not really but if you only knew how much I had.  As a true example, last night I opened my last jar from 2014 in order to make Honey Sriracha....

Wonderful yummy green flowering stalks of heaven.  I always look forward to spring when my asparagus bed starts to come up.  I get so excited to see how big the stalks are.  I mean sometimes they are the size of Scott's thumb.  Just love the stuff.  I love it cooked in so many different ways.  Since yesterday was Valentine's Day I bought some from the grocery store.  Wow, it was even on sale.  Yum, right?  Plus frugal.  As I was pondering just what to do with the asparagus Scott decided he was going to cook Shrimp and grits.  That was a bit different from what I thought he was going to cook so my asparagus turned from a side dish into an appetizer.   As usual, I started searching the internet for a recipe.  Again, as usual, I read several and then came up with how I wanted to do my recipe.  Since I wanted to use my air fryer I was going to have to adapt whatever recipe I found anyway.  I looked at sev...

Rice is such a versatile food.  You would not believe how incredibly easy it is when making it in your pressure cooker.   I have a rice cooker but I am telling you it is so much easier and much more delicious in the PC.  Seriously you know how sometimes when you make rice and it is sticky and clumps together, well with the electric pressure cooker you will never have this issue again.   One thing you need to know though white rice and brown rice have different cooking times.  I mean majorly different cooking times.  I prefer brown rice but when doing this recipe I found I was out of brown rice.  Oh well, since I was making this for the Mongolian Beef I guess it did not matter too much.   Rice  1 Cup Rice 1 Cup water pinch of salt 1 tsp oil Rinse your rice really well.  This is an important step in order for your rice to come out well. Add your oil first and then your rice into the inner pot in the bas...

I absolutely love Mongolian Beef.  I could eat it every day.  Well, maybe not every day because I am not a huge beef fan.   It is so yummy but going to PF Changs is a pain and would become quite pricey.  Yep, there is my frugal self-coming out.  I have made Mongolian Beef several times but I have not been totally happy with the results.  After doing tons of research on this recipe I narrowed down how I wanted to make it and I decided to use my pressure cooker.   This is the first time I have used my electric pressure cooker for this recipe and I have to admit I really like how it made the meat tender. As I have said, I love my pressure cooker and it is so much fun to use.   Mongolian Beef I dusted my beef with cornstarch in a ziplock bag  I used cubed beef like stew meat but a bit smaller.  I set my pressure cooker to saute mode and added sesame seed oil to warm.  Brown the meat very li...

Well, it is rather funny if you were to look in my cabinets to see all the various pre-packaged spice mixes I have.  Or even too gander into my spice cabinet to see how much I have and how anal I am on how I have them arranged.  The way I look at it since I do most of the cooking, shouldn't I be able to have things arranged as I want?  I can tell when someone has been in my spice cabinet.  Yep, I am a bit OCD with the order of stuff and I can normally find anything in that cabinet with one try.  That is why I can tell if someone has rearranged stuff.  I have my spices arranged by order of what I use the most. Makes perfect sense to me.   Last week I decided I would make a taco pie. Boy was it good too!  Of course, I can not just make a taco pie without doing tons of research on a recipe and then I will make it into what I want.  When I make something I get out all my ingredients prior to putting the dish together.  ...